We had to shut down my wife's laptop over Christmas and when we came to restart, the mouse does not respond at all. The pointer shows up but does not respond to either the mouse or the touchpad nor does it respond to any reasonable combination of keystrokes via the arrow keys on the keyboard. In effect, the mouse pointer is completely frozen. I can get very limited access via the arrow keys which let me jump between icons but I cannot do anything useful otherwise.

When I restarted the computer there were a pile of updates and I've installed those via the terminal in the hope it would sort whatever is causing the problem but no go.

I will have problems posting the result of any terminal commands as I've no obvious way of accessing the forum on her computer. I'm posting this from my own laptop.

She's on Mint 20 Cinnamon and has a logitech wifi mouse (I changed the battery so it's not that)

I think it would help to narrow the list of possible suspects.

This first thing I would do is test with a wired USB mouse. If that mouse still doesn't work, I'd try booting to a Live CD/USB of something not Debian related and testing again.

Let us know what happens.

1 members found this post helpful.

Since wireless. Guessing Bluetooth. Not sure if this will help or not. I always back up root text files and name them .old before editing them so to have a original backup to restore things to original.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...nect-on-reboot

tab key is useful also when in a desktop environment inside a open application to maneuver around to get to buttons.

Good Luck.

What is the make and model number of the laptop and mouse.

Does the mouse have its own USB receiver or does it connect to the laptops builtin bluetooth.

If the mouse has its own receiver does disconnecting it help the touchpad.

If not turnoff bluetooth or remove the mouse battery and see what happens.

First of all, it's a USB mouse not a bluetooth one

Second, I don't have a wired mouse any more

Third, I don't think the problem lies with the wireless mouse, it's more fundamental as the trackpad doesn't work either as I put in the thread title. I did the obvious thing, btw and changed the battery in the mouse. I'll check the mouse on my laptop just to ensure it's working properly though I don't think the mouse itself is the issue. I suspect it's either the driver software or the mouse settings in the OS that have got corrupted. We had to move the laptop over Christmas and didn't use it for much longer than expected and the battery ran down so there could have been an uncontrolled shut down.

Thanks to a suggestion in another forum, I tried my mouse in my wife's computer and it worked so I looked inside the mouse and found one of the battery contacts was filthy. I cleaned the contacts and replaced the battery and the mouse worked. It looks as if a battery had leaked at some point which surprised me as the battery I replaced looked clean.

Anyway all is working now and my take away lesson is check for mechanical faults first.

can someone tell my how to mark the thread solved?